Some of my readers appear to be new to reading and commenting on blogs. Here’s how I manage my comments: I moderate (personally) all the comments. That means I read them and approve them Any comment that has content, I approve. I don’t care who writes it. If I read a comment from anyone and
I was talking with a junior colleague recently. He can’t find a job. I offered to help network with him. He said no, he’d look for a job himself. Big mistake. If someone offers you help networking, take it! No matter who you are, how many years of experience you have, how sure you are
I’ve been reading Jeffrey Kaplan’s book, Strategic IT Portfolio Management, as part of my research for my project portfolio book. He says something astounding (I’m paraphrasing a sentence on p.73): Managers intuitively know when their projects are not delivering sufficient value. Wow, that has not been my experience at all. My experience is that managers
In the comments to Why Hire Junior Contractors?, one of my recruiter colleagues, MN Headhunter, asked a great question: …if we do not hire junior developers how they gain the experience to be a senior developer? I was not clear enough in my original post. I believe in hiring a diverse team, especially in diversity
I ran into Dan North at the Agile conference today, and explained a little about the project portfolio book. I’m writing it because I have a number of clients who are having trouble breaking the multitasking habit (working on more than one project at one time.) Dan said, “Oh, you want them to commit to
I’ve been steadily writing the project portfolio management book this summer, and was describing what I do to Steve Freeman someone today. (I’m at the Agile 2008 conference.) I explained that I had a list of things I thought should be in a chapter, but it wasn’t a real outline the way other people outline.
I wa just reading recent grad frustrated by job search, and want to highlight something many candidates, even experienced candidates, forget: Remember, a hiring manager is going to spend maybe a minute (or less) on the initial scan of your resume. What do you want her to see in that minute — a list of
One of the big problems in organizations is how to fund projects. ROI does not work. I learned how to lie with ROI back in 1988—I can make the numbers be anything you want. But if you don’t have ROI, how do you know what projects to fund? One set of projects is the set
George Dinwiddie asked me a question in email, “Why do companies hire junior-level contractors? I feel bad about spending the company’s money trying to teach these junior contractors to be better software developers. A junior-level direct hire makes sense, as you expect them to be around long enough that the education pays off. But a
A reminder: I’m teaching a public project management workshop in Waltham, MA, Sept 22-24, 2008. If you would like to: Understand different lifecycles and when (and how) to use them Practice pragmatic approaches to organizing and estimating a project Learn a variety of ways to steer a project to success Learn how to develop and